Police violence is a critical social determinant of health in the United States, but there is an absence of data on prevalence and sociodemographic disparities from national probability samples. This study aimed to determine the past-year prevalence of physical, sexual, psychological, and neglectful police violence exposure among young adults in the United States and to identify inequities in exposure. We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of the National Survey of Poly-Victimization and Suicide Risk, a population-based probability sample of noninstitutionalized young adults (18–29 years; N = 1,077) drawn from the nationally representative AmeriSpeak Panel. Logistic regression was used to test for associations between self-reported and census-based sociodemographic characteristics and past-year exposure to police violence (outcome), assessed using the previously validated Police Practices Inventory. Past-year police violence was widely reported among this general population sample (physical: 4.0%; sexual: 3.3%; psychological: 8.5%; neglect: 7.5%), equating to an estimated 2.1 million young adults exposed to physical violence and 1.7 million exposed to sexual violence. All police violence measures were associated with race/ethnicity in unadjusted analyses, with some outcomes also associated with gender identity, socioeconomic status, urbanicity, and region of residence. Black (non-Latine) race was the only consistent correlate of all four sub-types of police violence exposure in the adjusted analyses. Expanding upon prior studies that used nonprobability samples in select U.S. cities, we found that police violence is experienced by a substantial minority of the U.S. young adult population, and that ethnoracial disparities generalize beyond urban centers to a nationally representative sample.
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